Understanding the Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager

Introduction

HP management for Converged Infrastructure gives you a centralized management solution for HP BladeSystem

enclosures, for an entire data center, or for multiple datacenters

. Virtual Connect (VC) and Virtual Connect

Enterprise Manager (VCEM) are essential parts of HP Converged Infrastructure.

VCEM centralizes connection management and workload mobility for HP BladeSystem servers that use VC to access

LANs, SANs, and converged network infrastructure. VCEM eliminates the risk of address conflicts by maintaining an

address database for more efficient administration of data and storage network assignments (MAC and WWN).

Using VCEM, you can add, change, move, and automatically failover servers and their workloads across the data

center in minutes without affecting production networks.

This technology brief describes what VCEM does in the data center. It gives you an overview of the VCEM

architecture and details the interaction among VCEM, Virtual Connect Manager (VCM), iLO, and BladeSystem

Onboard Administrator modules. It explains VCEM management capabilities, integration, and scalability within

data center infrastructures. In this technology brief, we assume that you have some familiarity with HP BladeSystem

infrastructure. For more in-depth information on the technologies involved, see the HP BladeSystem technical

resources page at http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/c-class-tech-installing.html.

VCEM architecture and integration in the BladeSystem infrastructure

HP Virtual Connect is hardware abstraction technology that lets you configure and connect physical and virtual

servers. Through its ability to virtualize BladeSystem server connections to external networks, VC lets you add,

move, and change servers inside BladeSystem domains without affecting access to LAN and SAN within the

domain. We’ve converged networks using VC Flex-10 technology to replace multiple lower bandwidth physical NIC

ports, and using VC FlexFabric to implement LAN/SAN convergence technology. VC FlexFabric broadens VC

Flex-10 technology to provide solutions for converging these different network protocols.

You can use VCM to change, move, or redeploy any server within a single VC domain. VCM is embedded

firmware on the VC Ethernet Module and the VC FlexFabric Module. VCEM extends the VC architecture to large

multi-domain environments. You can use VCEM to change, move, or redeploy any server within the VC domains

that VCEM controls. VCEM is a plug-in for HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM) and benefits from the rich feature

set offered by HP SIM. These features include centralized authentication, enclosure discovery, and security.

VCEM acts as an external manager for VCM and uses it to communicate with the HP Onboard Administrators in

BladeSystem enclosures. We’ve designed Onboard Administrator modules and firmware for both local and remote

administration of HP BladeSystem c-Class. Each c7000 enclosure ships with a single Onboard Administrator

module. If desired, you can order a second redundant Onboard Administrator module for each enclosure. When

two Onboard Administrator modules are present in a c7000 enclosure, they work in an active−standby mode,

assuring full redundancy of the c7000's integrated management.

For more on this, see “HP Matrix Operating Environment Federated CMS Overview, HP Matrix OE infrastructure orchestration 7.0” at

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA3-4721ENW.pdf